I'm about to buy a wd my book live a server for myself and son who lives elswhere in the world to use as cloud storage(Free except cost and no monthly fees),to do a belt and braces job i use Acronis to back up to a bare external drive both laptop and desktop,hence main drive goes belly up all i do is change drive on either of them,it works for me and gives me peace of mind.

Thanks for the updates. I guess what I was trying to get to was - is there any way I can get the new external hard drive to backup the contents of the NAS drive it is connected to - without the intervention of any of my laptops? Would the software on a WD My Book Essential do this.

Lazarus the 2nd - would the Syncback software do this - or would it need to be installed on a windows machine and initiate the backup from there?

WD Anywhere doesn't support backup of its own NAS to an external USB drive, AFAIK, it installs on your laptop or PC and monitors their drives for changes which it backs up to the NAS. Not much use if, like me, you store no data at all on your laptop HDD and store it all on the NAS. As indicated, you can set an external program to run on your laptop/PC to backup the NAS to another hard drive either connected to the NAS or your laptop/PC (assuming it's mapped in the latter case), but in which case your laptop has to be awake for the backup to run.

The only NAS I've found so far that supports independent backup of the NAS to an external USB portable drive is the Buffalo Linkstation. I'd be interested if anyone knows of any other (reasonably priced) NAS's that can do this.

WD Anywhere doesn't support backup of its own NAS to an external USB drive, AFAIK, it installs on your laptop or PC and monitors their drives for changes which it backs up to the NAS. Not much use if, like me, you store no data at all on your laptop HDD and store it all on the NAS. As indicated, you can set an external program to run on your laptop/PC to backup the NAS to another hard drive either connected to the NAS or your laptop/PC (assuming it's mapped in the latter case), but in which case your laptop has to be awake for the backup to run.

The only NAS I've found so far that supports independent backup of the NAS to an external USB portable drive is the Buffalo Linkstation. I'd be interested if anyone knows of any other (reasonably priced) NAS's that can do this.